A secure and dependable trust assessment (SDTS) scheme for industrial communication networks

Due to tamper-resistant sensor nodes and wireless media, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are susceptible to various security threats that severely affect industrial/business applications. The survival of sensor networks is highly dependent on the flourishing collaboration of sensor nodes. Trust management schemes seem to be realistic and promising techniques to improve security as well as cooperation (dependability) among sensor nodes by estimating the trust level (score) of individual sensor nodes. This research paper presents a well-organized and motivating secure, dependable trust assessment (SDTS) scheme for industrial WSNs to cope with unexpected behavior such as an on-off attack, bad-mouthing attack, garnished attack, etc., by employing robust trust evaluation components based on success ratio and node misbehaviour. SDTS incorporates an interesting trust evaluation function in which the trust range can be adjusted in accordance with the application requirement. SDTS include direct communication trust, indirect communication trust, data trust, and misbehavior-based trust to defend the multiple internal attacks. SDTS works according to the behavior of nodes, i.e., whether the sensor nodes are interacting frequently or not. Moreover, abnormal attenuation and dynamic slide lengths are incorporated in the proposed model (SDTS) to deal with various natural calamities and internal attacks. SDTS is compared against three recent state-of-the-art methods and found efficient in terms of ease of trust assessment, false-positive rate (2.5%), false-negative rate (2%), attack detection rate (90%), detection accuracy (91%), average energy consumption (0.40 J), and throughput (108 Kbps) under the load of 500 sensor nodes with 50% malicious nodes. Investigational results exhibit the potency of the proposed scheme.